Transcript
David Pakman (0:07)
The air right now is thick with fear about immigrants. It is manufactured fear for sure. You know, you turn on cable news or scroll through your feed or listen to Trump give a press conference or speak in public and you're going to hear it. It's the same recycled narrative that immigrants are dangerous, they're a drain on the economy, they're a threat to real America. But if you step back from it for a moment and you get rid of the rhetoric and you just look at the facts, you find that reality shock is not what Stephen Miller is telling you. You find that immigrants are not a threat to the American dream. You find that immigrants really embody the American dream. They are building the American dream, sustaining it to the extent that it still exists and fighting for it really much harder than many of us ever have to. So we start with the big lie. And the big lie is immigrants are more prone to crime, immigrants are more prone to violence. We start there because that's the basis for which a lot of this anti immigrant rhetoric is based on. And that's one of the most dangerous and persistent lies that is out there. It's wrong, it's been disproven over and over again. We've got decades of research and it all tells us the same thing. Immigrants, whether they are documented or undocumented, commit fewer crimes than people born in the United States. We've got a major study in criminology that looked at this. The Cato Institute, not a left wing group, it's a libertarian group, found immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native born Americans. So at the top level, when you hear the dangerous illegals thing, ask people who say it, why does the data say the opposite? Give me data that proves dangerous illegals is a thing. This is a lie that's not really about safety. It's we need a scapegoat, let's create an enemy so politicians don't have to fix the real problems. And those same politicians love to say that not only are immigrants dangerous and violent, but they're also an economic burden. It's bad for the country and they take and they don't give. Immigrants are freeloading, especially undocumented immigrants. That is lie number two. The truth is that, number one, immigrants are keeping entire sectors of our economy up and running. Agriculture, construction, health care, hospitality. Immigrants are there doing the work that a lot of Americans won't do, can't do, especially in labor, short industries. I'm not pigeonholing immigrants documented and undocumented, but there are certain industries that disproportionately are relying on immigrant labor. The other interesting thing is we talk about the American dream in entrepreneurship. Immigrants start businesses at a significantly higher rate than native born Americans. So we are talking not only about a group of people that is not a drain on the economy. These are job creators, these are builders of community. And then we get to the economic aspect of it. Even undocumented immigrants pay taxes. They pay sales tax when they buy groceries. They are paying property taxes through rent. Many pay income taxes using taxpayer ID numbers. And so this idea that immigrants aren't paying taxes if they're undocumented, not true at all. So that takes us to what the people that say they are America first are saying. They are saying we need policies that would actually be devastating for the American economy. They claim we need to grow as an economy, we need innovation and we need a strong workforce. But immigrants are the engines of all of that. And at the same time, they want these mass deportations. The other interesting thing is you've got like the birth rate obsessed people, the people like Elon Musk obsessed with the birth rate coming down. If birth rates keep going down, which they probably will, and the population continues to age, where is the growth they so desperately want going to come from? It can only come from immigration, new families buying homes, enrolling their kids in school, paying taxes, building lives, building businesses, buying stuff in their communities. You look at science and technology. Foreign born workers make up nearly 60% of the most educated cohort of STEM professionals. Immigrants are filing patents, they're inventing things. They, I should say we. I'm one of these immigrants leading AI research. So why would we be telling them to get out? It's not America first, it's America last if you do that. And then that sort of gets us to the Trump era policy, which is the mass deportations, rounding up millions of people and tossing them out of the only country they've ever known. It's morally sick, it's logistically impossible, it's economically completely catastrophic. And to deport millions would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And why? To destroy industries, to separate families, to tank the gdp. It just doesn't make any sense and it's just as bad. Or to put a different way, in addition to all of the economic costs, the human costs are just absolutely disgusting. So why are we doing this stuff? Why are we fomenting the fear instead of the facts and pushing a policy of cruelty over compassion? Well, there's a couple different realities. Number one, it's always easier to demonize than to Understand? And to lift up, it's always easier to scapegoat rather than to say with nuance and with distribution, like you would expect in any group. Look at all of these great advantages to immigrants. And that has become unfortunately, part of Donald Trump's scapegoating sort of status quo. So, of course, on the facts, the next time someone tells you immigrants are ruining America, tell them to give you the information. Committing crimes? No. Dragging down the economy? Absolutely not. Helping innovation 100%. If they're worried about economic growth, you need immigrants. If they're worried about a declining birth rate, you need to bring in people from outside the country. That's the only way to counteract that or get people to live much, much longer. But, of course, unless they're actually working during those extended years, the economic benefit is going to be a real question mark. So we have it. If we really do have a country built on immigration, how is it the right path to shut the door after you've walked through it? It doesn't make any sense. And I think increasingly Americans are sort of realizing that never mind the fact that the deporting 3,000 people a day thing is just a delusional fantasy. Did Donald Trump get Stephen Colbert fired? This is pretty interesting. FCC chair Brandon Carr was on Fox News, and host Bill Hemmer just asks him, was Trump involved in that firing? And we certainly don't get a no. Here, take a listen to this.